The things people in the western world take for granted like refrigerated beverages and air conditioning are completely unheard of in many parts of the world. In Africa, 70% of people don’t have access to a utility electricity grid and never have. They do not have any electricity at all and so their day begins and ends when the sun rises and sets. Children cannot study at night unless they use smoky kerosene lanterns that spew toxic pollutants into the air and their parents are cooking over wood fires.
Amusingly, as the times are changing, Africa may skip right over the conventional utility grid and go straight to distributed renewables. This leap is made possible thanks to low-cost solar panels and plummeting prices for storage batteries. Not only will these renewables bring power to the people, but it will bring much-needed jobs too!
According to the African Development Bank, one hundred million youth entering the African labor market will be unemployed by 2030 if current trends continue. Today, youth comprise almost 20% of the unemployed in Kenya and Nigeria and 10% in India.
However, according to the first annual Powering Jobs Census (released by international NGO Power for All and its research partners) decentralized renewable energy solutions – including mini-grids, solar for households and businesses, and systems to power machinery such as irrigation pumps and other appliances – already employ as many people as the traditional utility power sector in the three countries surveyed – India, Kenya and Nigeria. Meaning that even though the challenge of “jobless growth” worsens, there is hope that the renewable energy industry can turn that around. It can also simultaneously tackle the other persistent challenge of the nearly 1 billion people across Africa and Asia still living in energy poverty with no access to electricity.
In a report about the survey, Forbes said:
For example, in Kenya, decentralized renewable energy companies directly employ 10,000 formal workers and that number is expected to grow 70% by 2022-23. By comparison, the state utility, KPLC, employs 11,000 today. In Nigeria, direct employment by the sector is expected to boom more than 10-fold by 2022-23 to 52,000 jobs.
What’s more, for every direct job created in the renewable energy industry, 4 to 5 more are created in the broader economy. Forbes continued:
Access to electricity is generating broader economic activity in rural communities. In India, for example, the census found 95,000 direct, formal jobs, but 470,000 productive use jobs. Overall, the census showed that 40% of jobs are being filled by youth. Women, on the other hand, account for just one-fourth of jobs, lower than the global renewable energy sector, suggesting that there could be significant untapped potential from achieving a better gender balance.
Rebekah Shirley, Power for All’s chief research officer and co-author of the census report, says:
This is a win-win. Access to electricity for rural communities in these countries means access to good work, and decentralized renewables are a major reason why. Governments and financial institutions should increase support for scaling these solutions and for training the technical, management, sales and other talent needed to wipe out energy poverty and improve the lives of an entire generation.
There have been estimates made already by GOGLA suggesting that by 2030 the entire off-grid renewable energy value chain can employ 4.5 million people, and up to 1.3 million full-time equivalent jobs in the off-grid solar sector, not including mini-grids, by 2022. However, this new census is the first real comprehensive measure of the whole industry at a country level and Power for All plans to expand the census further to 25 countries by 2021.
All of this is proof that all these regions with no traditional electric grid can just skip straight to distributing renewables! Recently, the US ambassador to Kenya was advocating for a new coal-fired generating station to supply a conventional energy grid that doesn’t exist, which makes absolutely no sense.
While rural populations in Africa and Asia carry on without any power just waiting for a centralized grid solution to arrive, inhibiting any chance of economic empowerment or real agricultural productivity gains, policy-makers and financial backers are dragging out the opportunity of this potential renewables boom. The fact that 11 million people globally are employed by renewable energy but only 2% of those jobs are in Sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) only highlights this stark reality.
The people in charge and the ones with the money have got to seize this opportunity for massive job creation by embracing the transition to more decentralized energy infrastructure and training the energy workforce of the future. It will all be for the best for everyone because the sooner renewables come to under-served communities, the faster their economies will grow.
